Threats to digital freedom are growing just as
the number of people accessing the internet is taking off, with millions more
likely to join the digital world through mobiles and smartphones in the coming
years.

The range of challenges is wide: from state
censorship, including firewalls and the imposition of network or country-wide
filters, to increasing numbers of takedown requests from governments, companies
and individuals, corporate hoovering up of private data, growing surveillance
of electronic communications, and criminalisation of speech on social media.

The rapid growth of threats to our digital
freedom, in democracies as well as authoritarian regimes, means that the next
few years could prove to be a watershed period determining whether the net
remains a free space or not. Defending our freedom online means taking action
now – beginning with understanding the nature of the threats and who lies
behind them.

Governments send
mixed messages

In democracies such as the US, UK, Sweden, India
or Brazil, governments and politicians will often make stirring calls to defend
digital freedom, emphasising that fundamental rights to freedom of expression
and privacy apply online as much as off. But faced with temptations, such as
the growing technological ease of mass population surveillance – from mobile
phones to internet usage, web searches and social media chat – too many
governments in democracies are starting to look at the sort of mass gathering of
communications data that previously only authoritarian regimes would consider.

This leads to strange contradictions in
government policy stances. In the UK, the government has temporarily withdrawn
its proposed ‘snoopers’ charter’ (the Communications Data Bill) in the face of swingeing criticism from an MPs’ scrutiny committee and from wider
civil society. The Bill in its proposed form would have represented the most
extensive mass surveillance of a population’s activities in the digital world
of any democracy.

Yet at the same time, the UK along with the US,
Germany and many other European countries has stood firm against attempts by
China and the Russia, with some support from an array of other countries, to
introduce top-down global control of the internet. Instead the UK government,
along with many other (though not all) democracies, has argued for the current
more “multistakeholder” model where no one body, country or group controls the
net. The Indian government wobbled to a disturbing extent on this before
refusing to go along with China and Russia at the major international telecoms
summit in Dubai last December, in their push for this top down control.

Countries such as China and Iran have,
unsurprisingly, been in the vanguard of those trying to build firewalls, block
websites, and in myriad ways limit, control and monitor their population’s use
of, and access to, the web. Yet the number of countries limiting the internet
in some way has grown sharply in the last few years. Some of the limits
introduced may seem unimportant, such as the Danish government having a
country-wide internet block on their population accessing gaming sites in other
countries (not for censorship reasons but to preserve the Danish monopoly on
this profitable business). But the more the internet is filtered at network or
country level, the less free it becomes.

There will always be arguments why a particular
filter is necessary – to tackle child porn, to protect children and young adults
from legal adult porn, to tackle crime and terrorism, to stop offence.
Filtering and blocking sites always run the risk of over-blocking, of hiding
not stopping a problem, and of being used for reasons beyond those stated.

Unless governments stand up for free speech,
there can be segments of the public who demand limits on speech that undermine
free expression as a fundamental right. One key example of this is the growing
sensitivity of many people to offence. Yet there is no right not to be
offended, and one person’s offence is another’s honest argument or piece of
creative art. In the UK and India, we have recently seen arrests and
prosecutions for supposedly offensive comments or photos and other postings on
social media (in the case of these two countries relating to the common root of
a 1930s English law that criminalised ‘grossly offensive’ phone, and then
electronic, communications). There is now growing concern and debate about this
criminalisation of mostly harmless social media comment. In the UK the director
of public prosecutions Keir Starmer has issued
interim guidelines in an attempt to rein in the growing number of such prosecutions.

Corporations as
censors too

Another disturbing part of this growing set of
threats to our web freedom is the role played by corporations. Many web hosting
companies and internet service providers state their support for fundamental
rights, including free expression, while insisting that they also have to obey
the laws of countries they are in. Google and Twitter have led the way in
publishing transparency reports showing the number of takedown requests and
user data information requests they have received from different governments.

But companies can become complicit in censorship
if they take content down too readily in the face of public or government
complaints – avoiding the risk of court cases or libel suits, playing safe.
Companies such as Facebook or Twitter also set their own terms of service which
define what is and is not acceptable usage and behaviour on their platforms.
Perfectly normal perhaps – just like a club sets the rules of behaviour of its
members.

But when the club, in the case of Facebook, is a
billion strong, and its terms of service dictate what types of images and
language are and are not acceptable, moreover dictating that anonymity is not
allowed, then these are the sorts of constraints on free expression that are
usually the preserve of governments to decide – governments that can be held
accountable by their citizens (in democracies) and challenged by civil society,
in the courts and through the ballot box.

The retention and commercial use of increasingly
large amounts of individuals’ data from their internet activities has also
sparked an extensive and vital debate about privacy. Privacy online is very
often closely intertwined with free expression online: if someone is monitoring
what you do or say or gathering it up and exploiting it commercially, that can
be a major chill on free speech.

Whether and to what extent there should be a
‘right to be forgotten’ is one part of this debate. Given the pervasive nature
of the web, actually deleting individual data is becoming increasingly
difficult. At the same time requests to delete individual data from news
reports, for instance, is a sort of censorship of the historical record which
would be highly undesirable.

Digital freedoms
closing down

There are a wide and
growing set of threats to our digital freedoms. But there are positive trends
too. The rapid, intense and so far successful fight back against various forms
of extensive imposition of copyright controls (ACTA, PIPA, SOPA and others)
shows this is not a one-way street.

Even in regimes like Iran
and China, many ordinary citizens have found ways to evade the censor, to widen
their ability to communicate and access information. Governments can be
challenged - at least in democracies - if they go down the route of mass
surveillance or criminalisation of social media comment. Defending our digital
freedom means becoming active, engaging with the arguments, making the case:
bad decisions and laws can be stopped, limited or reversed. It is a national
and an international debate – and the debate is now on.

About the author

Kirsty Hughes
is a writer and commentator on European and international politics. She has
worked at a number of leading European thinktanks including Chatham House,
Friends of Europe, and the Centre for European Policy Studies and has published
extensively including books, reports and as a journalist. She has also worked
as a senior political adviser in the European Commission, for Oxfam as head of
advocacy, and was CEO at Index on Censorship.

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